He told me the bazaar would be in a village, but instead it was this once-a-week creation off to the side of the 2 lane highway from Bishkek. I’d driven passed it before, but never gone in; seen it as close to a participant as I’d ever be.

With our little Toyota SUV, we took the place of a horse and its rider, who were waiting idly in between some cars on the other side of the road. Maybe there were fifty cars there total, and around 1,000 living beings, mostly made up of the toughest looking men this planet has to offer. The place also included flashier dressed city slickers, smart looking old men, women, children, and plenty of fat animals.

We entered the corral through a whole in the front gate, past a small restaurant, and a little grill selling shish kabobs and some other factory-made sundries. Inside of the bazaar, horses were tied up to the exposed rebar from the sides of the cement dividers. Posted along with their horses were men and their animals. Where the entrance sported a handful of sheep, the inside was about cows.

Surprisingly though, despite what my imagination told me would be cows as far as the eye could see, and thoroughly packed in, this whole arrangement offered only around fifty cows. But at 600 pounds and 16,000 som a piece, the place was nothing to scoff at. This plus the equal number of sheep and horses made the event worthwhile in its own right.

But the real spectacle was not even the animals, but the people attracted like shadows to the evening sun. We had come to meet my father’s cousin, a herder of about my age. He stood off in the corner of the bazaar with his 7 cows, a big lot for this place. Over the course of the day, he’d move from standing around the animals with us, to squatting on his heels, or reclining on the top of the cement barriers. He wore worn out sweat-pants tucked into his leather lace-up boots, a wind breaker and an old baseball-cap. He looked like he might have come in from the hills that very morning (and it was very possible he had.)

The men here fell roughly into two groups of people, distinguished by their dress; none of it traditional, as one thinks of it, but simply reflective of their daily needs. First there were the cowboys. Unlike our American version, few sported blue jeans. Instead, the name of the game was generally beat-up sweat pants, army fatigues, or other tough work pants. These generally paired with an old Adidas windbreaker.

The other group were the guys in for purchasing. My father, an owner, but not a herder, fell into that category (as did a few other men I met.) He fit in well, in his crisp, black-and-white Adidas track suite. Other men wore sport coats, sweaters and oxford shirts, and sometimes, flashy denim. Baseball caps were common, as were the traditional Kyrgyz kalpaks.

One thing all these men had in common was the complete arbitrariness of their footwear. No single style seemed to be the rule. The city slickers wore old gym shoes about as often as the cowboys wore tough boots, but more often than not, any man was likely to have on thin, leather dress shoes. Wingtips poking out of stirrups were not unheard of. Of the few women and children I saw, they might be in shoes, but might vey well also be in socks and cheap foam flip-flops. Women here wore sweaters, shalls and long skirts, no bras, and they all had scarves on their heads, the local tradition for signifying marriage. Boys road confidently around on horseback. The ground was a thick, stony gravel, decorated liberally with cow pies.

I was by far and away the only white person present. Even in this part of the country, white, ethnic Russians are not altogether absent. However, in this little, out of the way Mal Bazaar, I didn’t hear any but the most common Russian words sprinkled into the Kyrgyz.

I stood there, before our 7 cows, just biding my time, watching them, as they eschewed command over their bodily functions, and people occasionally asked me if I was selling or buying. Maybe it was my flashy Kyrgyz-man jeans that led them to assume I spoke the language, maybe my beat-up, corduroy driving hat, but it was probably just that no one but a buyer or seller would fathomably be there.

We stood around for an hour or two, giving our prices to buyers. Sometimes one or two would linger, ask more questions, and this would inevitably grow a crowd. But folks would eventually wander off, seeing that our prices weren’t fire-sale, and neither were they going to budge. One gentleman, in a baby blue track suit, covering a dark blue, knit cotton sweater, came back and forth a few times, using words like “gentleman” and “mister,” to try and egg on a deal. Finally, my father, despite his tone being amiable, just said, “you said 15,000, and we said no. Then you said 16,000, and we agreed. Then you said 15,000 again.” There wasn’t a lot of salesmanship here; the animals were present, the quality was clear, and the prices were as told.

Just before noon time, the air warming up, but the early Autumn snow resting unmoved at the tops of the surroundings mountains, a buyer who had probably been in and around all day, came up, asked about the cows and agreed to buy. My father was happy, his cousin was happy. We stood around a bit longer, long enough to be polite, shook some hands, bumped some heads, and then headed back to the city.

Originally Written October 17th, 2009

Along with this cohort of creatures subsequently come other merchants, toting all manner of things, from cheap China-made toys and trinkets, to clothing, produce, bootleg DVDs, traditional handicrafts and most other things one can imagine.

So my friends and I went to see this bazaar grow fat with animals returning from summer pasture in the hills. In the middle of the madness, we parked ourselves under the hull of what looked like a huge, wintertime stable, used currently as host to a collection of small restaurants. We sat, devouring a fresh watermelon, seven Kyrgyz shish-ka-bobs called “shashlik,” two pots of tea and loads of bread, all the while resting before the might of the snow-capped At-Bashi mountain range. The whole experience cost us less than 2 dollars apiece.

Meanwhile, at home, school is coming back into session, and the city seems as though it is beginning to flesh out.

Before this, I had not thought of my home here to be light on people, by any means. But as school has begun again, groups of school children are visible on the streets in the afternoon, and University students out and about at all hours, as any good University students should be.

Also exciting to note, the electric cables that run over the length of our main street are once again sporting trolley buses. These models of transportative efficiency, which don’t run in the winter, returned just in time for the first day of school, after spending the summer in Bishkek, for rest and repair.

Along with the students, returns their insatiable urge to learn English. While this is not my primary duty here in Naryn City, as a declared responder to self-addressed community needs, I cannot, in good conscious, completely ignore their requests. Consequently, I have acquiesced to monitoring an English language discussion club, for which I have set strict requirements to join, and rules stricter yet for attendance. This all to hopefully ensure that either I get a committed crew of students onto whom I can impart my goals for development of their country, or the club won’t form at all.

I feel I should take a minute to explain. Between college and my time developing countries, I have come to believe improvements in community development should be necessarily intrinsic. I.e. improving quality of life by helping people “want what they have,” instead of giving people ever more extravagant tools to “have what they want.”

Considering the overwhelming beauty I encounter here on a regular basis, I firmly believe, if one cannot appreciate life here, no amount of English (or anything else) could ever make one happy at all. But, on the other hand, if one can be happy here with these simple pleasures (with out without my help), one will then have the requisite skills to be happy anywhere.

But there I go, running my mouth off again. Happy Autumn, from my little corner of the world. Do yourselves all a favor, and find yourselves a hayride, on me.

Originally Written September 6th, 2009